Postmodernism

POSTMODERNISM AND FILM

Before addressing the postmodern features of individual films—by
far the more common approach to the post-modern in film that scholars have
employed—one should take note of the postmodern nature of
technology and distribution in the film industry today. In
Hollywood's golden age, a typical film was shot on 35mm celluloid
by one of a handful of studios. The cast and crew were under contract to
that studio. When the film was finished, prints were copied and sent out
to cinemas, which then projected the film for customers who paid a fixed
price to see it, typically as part of a larger program. Today the
situation is much different. Films are often shot on a digital format by
the major studios (now subsidiaries of multinational corporations), but
also by independent studios, independent filmmakers, or even amateurs (
The Blair Witch Project
[1999]). Stars are no longer bound to long-term contracts with the major
studios. They, and also most of a film's cast and crew, have agents
who negotiate rates per feature, not to mention publicists who try to
generate press for them so as to elevate their prestige among fans and in
the industry and thereby their salaries. Today studios bombard cinemas
with prints according to saturation-release strategies.
Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith
(2005) opened with a staggering 18,700 prints around the world, including
9,700 in 3,700 North American theaters. Some studios will only provide
prints to multiplexes who agree to show the film a certain number of times
per day. With the transfer to digital technology, it has been predicted
that in the near future "prints" will be e-mailed or beamed
via encoded satellite channels directly to cinemas—assuming cinemas
will exist in the future. It is now much more likely that one will watch a
given film on DVD, video, TV, in an airplane, or downloaded (legally or
illegally) via the Internet. Films are now shown with a number of
advertisements before the film and, increasingly, in the film itself. The
famous sequence from
Wayne's World
(1992), when Wayne overtly holds a Pepsi and intones that it is the
"choice of a new generation" with a wink and a nod, is
doubly postmodern. First, it is an example of product placement—the
(usually) discreet integration of a name, product, packaging, or logo into
a film—advertising, entertainment, and "art" are
merged. Second, it cannily responds to the increasing cynicism
vis-à-vis such marketing ploys, letting the audience in on the joke
even while the film still benefits financially from it.

This portrait of the current film industry provides several entry points
into a discussion of the postmodern, including the transition from
celluloid to digital filmmaking. In classic film theory, the ontological
basis for cinema—that is, how many film theorists accounted for its
existence—was the celluloid format: light (and actors, trees, a
set, or whatever stands before the camera) hits the film stock filtered
through a lens and is recorded on the celluloid. André Bazin called
this process the unveiling potential of film, the possibility to depict
reality. For Siegfried Kracauer, another realism theorist, by recording
and exploring physical reality, film "redeems" reality. What
then, does the digital format, which depends on the transformation of
light information received through the lens into combinations of 0s and 1s
and can be recorded and copied without data loss, mean? For Baudrillard,
this new configuration would surely serve as an example of how film has
become pure simulacra: the distinction between original and copy is lost.
The digital age of cinema represents its introduction into hyperreality.
For theorist Paul Virilio, the digital revolution signals the further
substitution or displacement of reality, in which a technological or
virtual reality replaces the human one and the distinction between factual
and virtual becomes meaningless.

In addition to the postmodern features of film as an industry and medium,
how might individual films themselves be postmodern? Intertextuality,
self-referentiality, parody, pastiche, and a recourse to various past
forms, genres, and styles are the most commonly identified characteristics
of postmodern cinema. These features may be found in a film's form,
story, technical vocabulary, casting,
mise-en-scène
, or some combination of these.

GUY MADDIN
b. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, 28 February 1956

Guy Maddin's films contain uncanny worlds that, at once strange
and familiar, are archives of film and culture references from high to
low. Born and raised on the Canadian prairies, Maddin is the best-known
exponent of "prairie modernism," which developed around
the Winnipeg Film Group.

Aesthetically, Maddin betrays a fondness for black-and-white
cinematography and a silent-film look lit from a single source. But
color footage often intrudes at unlikely places, accompanied by
intentionally discordant music and ambient sounds. Errors in continuity
or film equipment in the shot are par for the course in Maddin movies,
which have been filmed in abandoned warehouses, a grain elevator, a
foundry turned garbage depot, or in his mother's beauty salon.
Capturing the essence of a Maddin film is difficult.
Archangel
(1990), for example, takes place in the Russian city of the title
during World War I and involves several cases of mistaken identity. The
plot is conveyed with visual references to F. W. Murnau and Josef von
Sternberg, aged film stock, crackling soundtrack, and strange breaks in
the action. All suggest a film that appears to be a relic from the
1920s, but with 1990s irony.
The Saddest Music in the World
(2003) is a fable set in 1933 Winnipeg: a brewing magnate with
beer-filled glass legs announces an international contest to perform the
world's most sorrowful song. Part imaginary (film) history, part
madcap musical melodrama,
The Saddest Music in the World
is an offbeat film that is unmistakably postmodern.

In interviews, as in his films, Maddin refers to influences as diverse
as Pablo Picasso, the film director Douglas Sirk, the punk group the
Ramones, Mexican wrestling movies, hockey star Mario Lemieux, the 1933
musical
Footlight Parade
, Euripides, and Mary Pickford. His short
The Heart of the World
(2000), commissioned for the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival
as part of its Preludes series by ten Canadian directors, is perhaps his
masterpiece. In a mere six minutes he perfectly captures the style and
tropes of Soviet montage cinema of the 1920s.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Tales from the Gimli Hospital
(1988),
Archangel
(1990),
Careful
(1992),
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs
(1997),
The Heart of the World
(2000),
Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
(2001),
The Saddest Music in the World
(2003)

Perhaps the most renowned postmodern director is Quentin Tarantino. The
dialogue of films such as
Reservoir Dogs
(1992) and
Pulp Fiction
(1994) rely heavily on seemingly meaningless chatter about TV shows, pop
music, B movies, and celebrity gossip. In
Jackie Brown
(1997) Tarantino cast the actress Pam Grier, relying on her past image as
a sex symbol in 1970s

Guy Maddin.

blaxploitation films such as
Coffy
(1973) and
Foxy Brown
(1974) in order to channel that legacy into his own film. This postmodern
casting move has also been used famously by directors such as Pier Paolo
Pasolini, who in his
Mamma Roma
(1962) cast Anna Magnani as the title character, consistently quoting and
twisting the iconic image she acquired in Roberto Rossellini's
Roma, Città Aperta
(
Rome, Open City
, 1945). Jean-Luc Godard's casting of Fritz Lang as the director in
Le Mépris
(
Contempt
, 1963) is similar. Tarantino has made it a hallmark of his cinema,
drawing on former stars such as John Travolta in
Pulp Fiction
and Darryl Hannah in the
Kill Bill
films (2003–2004).

Tarantino's casting is an example of postmodern
intertextuality—a work's quoting, plagiarizing, or alluding
to other films or cultural artifacts—a phenomenon that abounds in
postmodern cinema. For example, in the first few minutes of
Lola rennt
(
Run Lola Run
, 1998), Lola (Franka Potente) receives a phone call from her boyfriend
Manni that he needs money desperately. Lola throws up the telephone
receiver, which director Tom Tykwer films in slow motion, alluding to the
famous cut from the bone to the space station in Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). She then lets out a glass-shattering scream, just like
Oskar's in Volker̈ndorff's
Die Blechtrommel
(
The Tin Drum
, 1979). The two sentences at the beginning of the film, "the ball
is round" and "the game lasts for ninety minutes,"
are famous quotations from Sepp Herberger, a well-known German soccer
coach. Finally, the painting which hangs over the casino scene is of Kim
Novak's back, alluding to the painting in
Vertigo
(1958) that Novak's character obsessively stares at in the museum.

The system of allusion and quotation such as that found in
Run Lola Run
—which mixes both "high" art and "low"
popular cutlture from various time periods and cultures—is a
typical feature of postmodern cinema, and is often referred to as
pastiche
. For Jameson, parody refers to the use of various styles, genres, or
texts for a critical purpose, while pastiche is a blank form of parody,
blithely mimicking past forms without an underlying critical perspective.
This distinction may be construed as problematic, however, since whether a
film engages in parody or pastiche with its intertextuality is largely a
matter of interpretation. Does
Jackie Brown
meditate on the legacy of blaxploitation films in the presence of Pam
Grier, or does she merely constitute an in-joke for the initiated? Is
Run Lola Run
an attempt to come to terms with (German) film history, or are the
allusions empty gestures of an exhausted film industry? The answers to
these questions are hardly clear-cut.

Many argue that the postmodern has also infiltrated the narrative form of
many films. Unlike in Hollywood's heyday, when the plot was
transmitted in the most seamless fashion possible, many twenty-first
century films, both Hollywood and independent, strive for a narrative that
defies linear logic.
Run Lola Run
presents three different scenarios for Lola's quest to save her
boyfriend, and she seems to learn from the past attempts, a narrative
configuration that some have likened to the logic of a video game rather
than a typical feature film. Likewise, films such as
Blind Chance
(1987),
Sliding Doors
(1998), and
Melinda and Melinda
(2004) present alternative stories.
Rashomon
(1950) and
Jackie Brown
are films in which a single story is told from several different
perspectives, but
Jackie Brown
parodies Kurosawa's canonical modernist experiment in
Rashomon
by relocating these point-of-view sequences from the epic landscapes of a
Japanese forest and ruined temple to the banal setting of a nondescript US
shopping mall. Other films use postmodern intertextuality as the sine qua
non of their narratives.
Forrest Gump
(1994) is unthinkable without the fictional Forrest's
postproduction insertion into documentary footage of real US presidents
and celebrities; Woody Allen's imaginary history
Zelig
(1983) works along similar lines. These films function by blurring the
boundaries between fact and fiction, history and story. Finally, some see
the blockbuster's "narrative" to be a consequence of
the postmodern. Schlo

Guy Maddin's allusive
Archangel
(1990).

Rather than functioning as a cause-and-effect story, the blockbuster often
organizes itself as a series of attractions (special effects, explosions,
car chases) that spectators anticipate and enjoy. What the film is
"about" becomes inconsequential or, at best, secondary, to a
string of shocks designed to overload the senses.

The matter of style is another tricky question in the context of
postmodern cinema. Is the "machine-gun" editing in Darren
Aronofsky's
Pi
(1998) and
Requiem for a Dream
(2000), Guy Maddin's
The Heart of the World
(2000), and MTV music videos necessarily or equally post-modern? How are
these projects different stylistically from early Soviet filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein's
Stachka
(
Strike
, 1925),
Bronenosets Potyomkin
(
Battleship Potemkin
, 1925), and
Oktyabr
(
Ten Days that Shook the World
and
October
, 1927)? The question of intention, taboo in poststructuralist thinking,
might nonetheless help us here. Whereas the modernist Eisenstein made his
films as propaganda tools aimed to garner support for a metanarrative
(Leninism), Maddin is much more interested in evoking the mood or style of
Soviet montage filmmaking, but with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Finally, production design is often cited as a yard-stick of postmodern
cinema. Whereas the modernist architecture of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus
school called for a marriage of form, function, and social utility,
examples of postmodern architecture might mix elements reminiscent of the
Renaissance, baroque, neoclassical, Gothic, and modernist in the same
facade. So too, for example, does Bo Welch create Gotham City in Tim
Burton's
Batman Returns
(1992), which pays homage to several German expressionist films along
with art deco and other stylistic touches. The dystopic Los Angeles of
Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner
(1982) has often been cited as the postmodern cine-city par excellence.
The film's production design cites numerous historical influences
including, most obviously, film noir. As Giuliana Bruno has noted, the
city in
Blade Runner
is not a vision of ultramodern skyscrapers and orderly, mechanized
interiors, but rather a hodgepodge aesthetic of recycled decay
("Ramble City").

It is ironic that in spite of theorists' desire to proclaim the end
of grand narratives in the age of post-modernism, there is the tendency in
their writings to generalize and universalize the postmodern nonetheless.
But the generation of Lyotard, Jameson, Baudrillard, and Virilio, which
diagnosed the postmodern largely as an inevitable symptom of cultural
exhaustion or capitalistic excess, is giving way to a younger generation
of theorists less eager to predict doomsday scenarios. D. N. Rodowick, for
example, has outlined a philosophy of the transition from analog to new
media technologies which acknowledges the new ontological basis for
digital films without claiming that this new basis must signify the end of
referentiality, as Baudrillard has.

Other articles you might like:

User Contributions:

Darryl Hannah does not star in the Kill Bill movies. The actress is Uma Thurman and she was hardly a has-been. She was certainly not as famous as she became after this series, but she was not an unknown either. She had starred in or had secondary roles in numerous films prior to Kill Bill including Pulp Fiction.

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: